I feel so sorry for my wife.  It seems that every time she buys me a birthday present, it's not exactly what I want.  I guess I'm picky.  This year it happened twice, but I'll start with the car stereo.  My wife used the link I sent her to purchase the stereo that I wanted.  Seems easy enough.  Unfortunately Crutchfield sent the wrong stereo.  The stereo they sent was the same price, but a different brand.   My wife got on the phone with Crutchfield to figure out the problem.  I was again impressed with Crutchfield.  Even though my wife’s receipt said that she ordered the stereo that we got, they immediately took blame for it.  They shipped out the stereo I wanted with 2 day shipping and gave her an RMA for the original stereo.  They even included all the pre-paid shipping labels in the original box so shipping back would be easy.

I was pretty excited when I saw the box for my new stereo on my porch after work on Friday.  I also noticed that FedEx had been to the house which meant they tried to deliver my headphones.  FedEx is open until 8:30pm so I figured I’d install my stereo real quick and then head over to FedEx.

I removed my factory stereo and then started getting ready to install the new one.  That’s when I realized that I had one plug that would plug into my car stereo jacks, but only had bare wire exposed on the other end of it.  Then there’s a plug that goes into my new stereo on one end, but again… exposed wire on the other side.  I thought… “no way, there certainly must be a standard way to plug in a car stereo… right”?

Wrong.

I read the directions in more detail and they suggested that I solder the wires together and use shrink tubing and a heat gun to connect them.  Included was a wiring diagram for the car plug and my new stereo came with one for its plug.

Well, I have a soldering iron and some solder, but I only used it once, a long time ago… and not on something expensive like my car or a stereo.  So, should I just take it somewhere, or should I try it? 

I ran over to FedEx with a gaping hole in my dash where the old stereo was to ponder the question and pick up my new headphones.

What the hell.

I went to the hardware store and picked up a heat gun and some shrink tubing.  Then I ate dinner with my wife and had a few martinis.  It wasn’t as hard as I thought.  I matched up the wiring diagrams and created a converter from my new stereo to my car plugs. 

I installed the stereo in my car and fired it up… worked like a charm first try.

Even though I got a great sense of accomplishment by doing my own wiring, I still am baffled that there isn’t a standard way of connecting a car stereo to a car.  Can you imagine if every time I got a new DVD player, I had to solder a wire to connect it to my TV?  Why hasn’t the auto industry standardized this?